BRAY

BRAY. This name occurs in all the copies of the so-called Roll of Battel Abbey, and that a great family so designated migrated from Normandy at the period of the Conquest seems pretty certain. Three places in that province are still called Brai ; two in the arrondissement of Falaise,. and one in that of Bernai. But we have also at least two places called Bray in England ; one a parish in Berkshire, well knovra for its time-serving ecclesiastic, who amidst all the fluctuations of creeds in the XVI. century, made it his ruling principle " to live and die vicar of Bray ;" the other, an estate in the parish of St. Just, near Penzance, co. Cornwall. This latter, according to Hals, " gave name and origin to an old family of gentlemen surnamed De Bray, who held in this place two parts of a knight's fee of land 3. Hen. IV. I take the Lord Bray of Hampshire to be descended from this family." D. Gilbert's Cornwall, ii. 282. As a proof of the wide diffusion of the name, it may be mentioned that the dictionaries of Heraldrj' assign more than twenty different coats of arms to it.

Lower, Mark A (1860) Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom. London: J.R. Smith. Public Domain.